i'm a lurker who has been watching pokemon speed runs for about 10 months... you might have seen me in werster and gunnermaniac3's chats. hi!

anyway, I was very curious about the debate between RTA and IGT and became more curious after learning pikachu's cry doesn't add to IGT. with that in mind, and using dabomstew's Bizhawk lua mod, I decided to test out exactly what can effect IGT in pokemon yellow.

basically it seems any event that whites out the screen (entering or exiting a room, accessing pokemon menu, accessing badge record menu, battles ending, etc.) causes a lag of several frames, upwards to 6-10 frames per event. these frames can be tracked with the "display lag counter" option in bizhawk. pikachu's cry causes a continuous lag for the duration of it's cry. also interesting is the number of lag frames per random encounter, which was around 16 frames per encounter.

what's interesting is several times after I exited a menu or caused a new "white screen" event, there occurred an error that lagged 1 frame per step I took. this happened inside, outside, anywhere I could walk. this error happened several times and appeared to be random. but imagine getting this error after exiting oak and getting no encounters up to the pokemart in viridian, you'd lag a frame for every step in that entire walking sequence.

another similar error occurred twice during my experimenting, once on route 1 and once in S.S. anne where after a "white screen" event, simply standing around caused 3 frames to lag per second... and walking caused upwards of 6-8 frames of lag.

finally, after 2 hours of experimenting I lagged 6920 frames, which is almost 2 minutes IGT... and some of this time was me just standing around as I was typing notes

anyway, I don't know the entire yellow route so I didn't go further, but I highly recommend any of you trying this out using the emulation setup I described and see for yourselves how much IGT is off due to lag frames...

I don't know if this has been tested but another part where I feel (extra) lag frames occur is when you get a random encounter where there are overworld objects. For instance in pokemon mansion when you have to load the doors as well or in victory road when the removable blocks loads up. Needless to say I find this issue rather interesting and I wonder if does add unjustified time to runs or is fair in the end.

You drive up a huge point i'm curious about there. Can we get some sort of comparison of lag on boulder pushes between consoles/different emus? Cause i've always felt like the lag on yellow boulders is insane